Will Pinkethman was a first-rate comedian. The biographer of his contemporary, Spiller, says, “the managers of the Haymarket and Drury Lane always received too much profit from Pinkey's phiz, to encourage anybody to put that out of countenance!” And Pope refers to one popular qualification that he possessed, viz. eating on the stage (as did Dicky Suett, in after days, Dicky Gossip, to wit!) with great comic effect. “And idle Cibber, how he breaks the laws, To make poor Pinkey eat with vast applause!” He was celebrated for speaking prologues and epilogues. * He realised a good fortune by his Puppet-show, and kept a booth at Bartholomew Fair. Two volumes of “Jests” * bear his name. Many of them are as broad as they are long. His love-letter to Tabitha, the fair Quakeress, signed “Yea and Nay, from thy brother in the light,” is wickedly jocose. Thus Bartholomew Fair, in 1701, boasted its full complement of mimes, mountebanks, vaulters, costermongers, *** gingerbread women, (“ladies of the basket!”) puppet-shows, **** physiognoscopography,-- * Particularly “The New Comical Epilogue of Some-Body and No-Body, spoken by way of Dialogue between Mr. Pink-ethman and Jubilee Dicky” (Norris, so christened from his playing Beau Clincher in Farquhar's Trip to the Jubilee.) ** “Pinkethman's Jests, or Wit Refin'd, being a new year's gift for young gentlemen and ladies, 1721, First and Second Parts.'7 A fine mezzotinto portrait of Pinkethman, represents him in a laced coat and a flowing wig, holding in his hand a scroll, on which is inscribed, “Ridentibus arrident Vultus *** Archdeacon Nares defines a costard-monger, or coster- mon-ger, to be “a seller of apples, one who generally kept a stall,” **** “Here are the rarities of the whole Fair, Pimperle-Pimp, and the wise Dancing Mare; Here's Vienna besieg'd, a rare thing, And here's Punchinello, shewn thrice to the King. Ladies mask'd to the Cloisters repair, But there will be no raffling, a pise on the May'r!” From Playford's Musical Companion, 1701. --Punches, and Roast Pig. * But its Drama was in abeyance. ** The elite of Pye-Corner, Gilt-spur Street, and the Cloth-quarter, preferred Pinkethman's Medley and Mr. Barnes's Rope-dancers, to “The Old Creation of the World New Revived,” with the intrigues of Lucifer in the Garden of Eden,-- * “A Catch--Mr. Henry Purcell-- Here's that will challenge all the Fair: Come buy my nuts and damsons, my Burgamy Pear. Here's the Whore of Babylon, the Devil and the Pope: The girl is just going on the rope. Here's Dives and Lazarus, and the World's Creation: Here's the Dutch Woman, the like's not in the nation. Here is the booth where the tall Dutch Maid is,